Tuesday was the first day of ZF Digital ’12 held in Bucharest at the Marriott hotel. The conference has been organized by Ziarul Financiar in partnership with Vodafone, Intel, UPC, Lenovo, Schoenherr and Noerr.
“I am cautiously optimistic… In the past few years, market stabilized, and there are also two trends in customer behavior: data traffic and smartphones, so the future also has positive aspects, despite market difficulties,” said Inaki Berroeta, chief executive officer of Vodafone Romania.
Stefanos Theocharopoulos, CEO of Cosmote and Romtelecom, commented in his turn: “We are living in one of Europe’s most competitive and cheapest market.” The companies’ revenues mainly come from the voice segment, and the voice services will always be important, since they’re the basis of communication, Theocharopoulos said. “Considering how the market has grown, I don’t think there will be significant price increases because people have become used to the service and would react negatively to an increase.”
The implementation of 4G technology starting next year will lay the basis of a new method of communicating and relating.
The arrival of 4G will bring the fastest services, and increased familiarity with mobile devices, said Jean-Francois Fallacher, CEO of Orange Romania. He thinks television will become increasingly important, but watched on mobile phones, tablets. “There will be screens everywhere in the future,” Fallacher also said.
In turn, the CEO of Vodafone said the way in which people in the industry and customers see the products will change. “How fast customers can access the devices will be more important than how fast they are introduced. This is the determining factor in the introduction of these new technologies,” Berroeta said.
Dan Bulucea, head of Google Romania, announced that the Romanian division grew twice as fast as the rest of the countries in the region.
“We have big plans: What we have done so far is very little. We have plans in two directions: for users – localized services and for businesses, which have yet to use online potential to the maximum. (…) Everything that can be sold in this world will sooner or later be sold online.”
(English version by Daniela Stoican)